Motherboard (or mobo) Specifications

GIGABYTE GA-Z68X-UD4-B3 Intel Z68 Motherboard – ATX, Socket H2 (LGA1155), Intel Z68 Express, 2133MHz DDR3, SATA 6.0 Gb/s, RAID, 7.1-CH Audio, Gigabit LAN, SuperSpeed USB 3.0, CrossFire/SLI Ready

In August of last year the Intel Z68 chipset looked the most promising as there were a lot of other chipsets released around the same time which were recalled due to various issues. This chipset was released May 11th of 2011 and there were still retailers selling the recalled P67 and H67 mobo’s. This mobo I choose supported the best 2nd general Intel i7 processors along with the high speed DDR3 memory; which means I can get more from my buck later on when I have the cash to upgrade both.

Processor & Memory Specifications

Intel Core i5-2300 BX80623I52300 Processor – Quad Core, 6MB L3 Cache, 1MB L2 Cache, 2.80 GHz (3.10 GHz Max Turbo), Socket H2 (LGA1155), 95W, Fan, Retail

With a budget in mind I decided on this processor, can always upgrade later. Nothing more to really talk about except mention I prefer Intel over AMD.

Corsair CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9B Vengeance Desktop Memory Kit – 8GB (2x 4GB), PC3-12800, DDR3-1600MHz, 9-9-9-24 CAS Latency, Intel XMP Ready, Unbuffered

Again with budget in mind, $55 for 8GB of memory is a good deal. I’ve been using Corsair memory for a very long time and never had any issues so I tend to stick with them.

Video Boards

Ah, here comes the major research although didn’t take that long once I stumbled across an article on Toms Hardware. I decided to go with an SLI setup of the following video board:

GIGABYTE GV-N550OC-1GI GeForce GTX 550 Ti Video Card – 1GB, GDDR5, PCI-Express 2.0 (x16), Mini HDMI, Dual DVI, DirectX 11, SLI Ready, Overclocked

Now, the reason I decided to go with this video board (two of them) is mostly due to the article I read and I wish I had a link to it (i’ll see if I can dig it up and add it here later). But it basically it was very close to the performance of the highest end nVidia video board back when they came out. For half the cost of the single video board I decided to go with the dual 550 Ti’s obviously in SLI mode.

Hard Drives and Operating System

I wanted to go with two hard drives and since the mobo supported SATA 6G drives that’s what I went with. Wanted a small one for OS and other applications then a larger one for games to be installed on. Here’s what I went with:

WD Caviar Blue 500GB SATA Hard Drive – 7200/16MB/SATA-6G

Western Digital WD1002FAEX Caviar Black Hard Drive – 1TB, 7200RPM, 64MB, SATA 6G

And thanks to Tiger Direct I also purchased a OEM copy of Windows 7 Pro 64-bit.

Summary

Been about a year and I have been nothing but satisfied with this custom built system I put together for myself. Haven’t found a game that’ll bring it to it’s knees yet and doubt I will for many more years. And when I do come across one the price of the 2133MHz DDR3 memory and 2nd generation Intel i7 processors will be much less and I can get another big performance gain out of the system. This budget system will been my best build for a very long time. Here are a few pictures of the hardware:

If you’re still interested in utilizing the MobileMe Backup you can grab it from Apple’s website here.

Anyway, if you’re experiencing an overheating Mac system it appears that the new OS requires a complete reindex of your system. This can take awhile to run and will consume a lot of your system resources. If you look at your Activity Monitor you’ll probably see mdworker using anywhere from 5 to 90% of the processor. My reindexing is still going on but my system temperature should drop once the indexing is done (my system temp reached 168 degrees).

zip -re filename.zip dir_name

To zip a single file and password protect it just omit the r in -re

Both commands will prompt for a password and to confirm the password.

I applied some simple Layer Styles, gradient overlay to the background and replaced the dot in the i with a simple, yet cheesy, starburst shape. For a quick idea, and fun, I thought it turned out okay but nothing special.